Theatre Studies Department
School of Performing Arts
University of Malta
The Death of Opera?
A three-lecture series delivered by
Professor Nicholas Till
University of Sussex, UK
Schedule
Monday 6 January 2014 – 10:00-12:00
The Death of Opera?
Venue: GWHB2
Tuesday 7 January 2014 – 10:00-12:00
The Birth of Opera
Venue: GWHB1
Wednesday 8 January 2014 – 10:00-12:00
Music Theatre after Opera
Venue: GWHD2
Abstract
In the 1960s, the German musicologist Theodor Adorno pronounced that opera was an
‘eviscerated’ art form that didn’t know that it had died. Yet fifty years later opera continues to
command a substantial tranche of public arts budgets throughout Europe, despite being
recognised to be an essentially museum art form that is only kept alive on the life support
machine of public subsidy. In these three lectures I will ask why so many critics have
pronounced opera to be dead over the years, going all the way back to the moment it was
born in 1600. I will consider the historical implications of the death of opera in relation to the
wider social and cultural status of opera today, examining in particular the class status of
opera as “high art”, and its wider dissemination in popular culture through vehicles such as
soundtracks for films and advertisements, or a popular challenge TV programme such as the
British TV series “Pop Star to Opera Star”. I will examine how many of the ideological
suppositions that underpin opera as a dramatic and cultural form can be traced back to its
origins in the seventeenth century, and finally, I will consider the creation of new forms of
post-operatic music theatre that challenge the moribund nature of the conventional forms of
opera.
Bio Note
Nicholas Till is a historian, theorist and practitioner working in opera and music theatre. He
worked professionally as an opera director for fifteen years, and has also worked as a writer
and director of new works for the English National Opera Studio, Royal Opera Garden
Venture, Stuttgart Opera, etc. Since 1998 he has been co-artistic director of the experimental
music theatre company Post-Operative Productions. In 1994 he was appointed as a Lecturer at
Wimbledon School of Art in London, where he was Course Leader for the MA in
Scenography. He has also taught theatre studies at Queen Mary, University of London. In
2001 he was Visiting Professor in Opera at UCLA (Los Angeles), and in January 2006 he
gave the Neumann Lectures at the University of Richmond in Virginia. He is currently
Professor of Opera and Music Theatre at the University of Sussex, where he is also director of
the Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre. His publications include Mozart and the
Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue and Beauty in Mozart’s Operas (1992), and The Cambridge
Companion to Opera Studies (2012). His own work has been discussed in Francesco
Ceraolo’s Registi All’Opera: Note sull’etstetica della regia operistica, published in 2011,
which includes a complete translation into Italian of his 2004 manifesto for a post-operatic
music theatre entitled "I don't mind if something's operatic, just as long as it's not opera". He
currently holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to undertake research on early
opera and modernity.
The lecture series is open to the general public